Wyandanch might have been just another picket-fenced suburban outpost had it not been for builder Henry Taca, who in 1951 proposed a “non racial” housing development called Carver Park. It was an instant hit with hundreds of black veterans turned away at Levittown and forced, as one put it, “to slink back to Harlem.”

Carver Park changed more than housing practices, of course. It drove away most of Wyandanch’s whites – but many of its upwardly mobile black residents, too – beginning a long downward spiral that the Wyandanch Rising project aims to reverse.

There are many oars in the water on this, including Washington and Albany, the county and town, the MTA and private builders and banks. That they’re all rowing in the same direction is historic. Could Long Island, at long last, be rising, too?